Why did Beale use the Declaration of Independence?

chalkoutline

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Ciphers are typically used for two-way communication. They are based on a set of rules such that a person aware of those rules could send and receive encoded messages to and from another person who also knows the rules.

This was not the case for Thomas Beale. His cipher was a one-time cipher to hide a treasure where one person is given the cipher and another is given a key. When the two come together after his demise, the treasure can be found.

For this application you do not even need a numbered document to create the KEY; you just write down a bunch of numbers and assign ALL the letters you plan to use in the message to those numbers.
a. The numbers and the assigned letters are solely at the discretion of the cipher creator making it unreproducible. This becomes the KEY.
b. Use the KEY to assign a number to each letter of the message.
c. Write down the numbers from the message in sequence. This is the CIPHER.
d. Give the CIPHER to Robert Morriss, give the KEY to the person in St. Louis and destroy the numbered message.

The Treasure, the location and the owners are all encrypted and safeguarded with an irreversible cipher.

It makes sense that the only reason to use the Declaration of Independence and such a simple substitution cipher would be to lure a reader into thinking he could solve the other two ciphers.
 

From the perspective of the Beale treasure being a hoax, it makes perfect sense. Give the character the name Thomas Jefferson Beale and it won't take long for someone to figure out that one of the ciphers is based on Jefferson's most famous document. Then make the other two ciphers unintelligible gibberish with no solution. Now everyone "knows" there is a massive treasure buried in the area but they don't know where, so you have a nice ploy to sell pamphlets and bring in tourism. Seems to have worked.
 

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